1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a mobile data communication system and, particularly, to a system and method for transmitting data from a base station to a mobile terminal.
2. Description of the Prior Art
Recently, a mobile telephone system has been used for not only telephony but data communication. For example, there have been commercially available a mobile data communication device which is detachably connected to the mobile telephone terminal and a mobile terminal integrating a telephone terminal with a mobile data communication terminal.
In general, such a mobile terminal is battery-powered and it is desirable that its power consumption is as small as possible. For this purpose, the transmission power of a mobile terminal is smaller than that of a base station. To achieve balanced received signal strength at either side of the mobile terminal and the base station, it is necessary to provide the base station with a high-gain antenna placed at a high position such as the rooftop of a building. However, it is clearly found that there are the limitations of the antenna of a base station in gain and installation height.
Therefore, it is necessary for a mobile terminal to increase its transmission power to same extent. For instance, a transmission power of 1 Watt is needed. The increased transmission power causes the size of a power IC and its heat sink and further the capacity of a battery to be large, resulting in difficulty in miniaturization. In other words, there has been a tradeoff between miniaturization and transmission power.
In such a condition, movement of a mobile terminal causes a received signal strength to fluctuate at either side of the base station and the mobile station. When the received signal strength is reduced, especially in the case of the mobile terminal located at an end of a radio zone formed by the base station, the radio communication channel is disconnected. Further multipath fading also causes a significant fluctuation of received signal strength which would result in channel disconnection.
To avoid such undesired channel disconnection, there has been proposed a polling communication method in Japanese Patent Unexamined Publication No. 60-148238. According to the conventional method, a stationary station optimally selects an antenna and a use frequency for each mobile terminal to improve the quality of channel transmission.
However, even when the antenna and the use frequency is optimally selected, the influence of fading cannot be avoided. Therefore, in the case where the mobile terminal is located away from the base station and the received signal strength is weak, the occurrence of fading easily causes the communication channel to be disconnected. In other words, the operable radio zone of each base station becomes substantially smaller. Therefore, the operable service area of the mobile communication system is substantially reduced.